Creative passions

The 22-23 symphony season began with passionate secrets in music and ends with other passions, this time the creative impulses that passion awakens in composers.

Emblematic of this process of invention, the Symphonie fantastique is in itself nothing less than a treatise on revolutionary orchestration. The work of a young genius of 27 who poured into his music all the raging excess of his mad love for an Irish actress, it is built around an explicit programme: a young musician falls in love with a woman in whom he sees the ideal being of whom his passion has been dreaming. Discovering her to be unworthy of this love, he poisons himself with opium and imagines himself first as the murderer of his muse walking to the scaffold, then among the witches of a Sabbath night celebrated for his own funeral.

Another creative passion is at the root of Edvard Grieg's lyrical and immensely tender Piano Concerto. The composer had just married his cousin Nina Hagerup the previous year and a daughter, Alexandra, had been born. The whole of this moving score bears the traces of youthful ardour, love and radiant fatherhood that carried the composer through these weeks of happiness, and magnifies one of the most intense and passionate moments of his life.

But just like last October, Brahms, the secretive Brahms, the taciturn Brahms, once again remains elusive! Who can say what passion gave rise to this Tragic Overture, at once tender and rugged, imbued with the legendary and fantastic atmospheres of his native North? Perhaps it was simply the intense nostalgia for a country whose melancholy will never leave him...